Round-ups

Have to spend half the afternoon in unpaid labor at the campus. To be allowed to continue teaching online courses, we’re required to attend a three-hour workshop in Canvas, the new course management software with which the college is replacing hated Blackboard. The thing is, Canvas has online tutorials, and so it’s unclear exactly why we need to sit through three hours of unpaid training.

It’s particularly annoying because I have no intention of changing my present strategy, which is to post an announcement on the CMS’s homepage directing students to the website I constructed after I ran out of patience with Blackboard.

If they order me to stop doing that, then I will quit teaching the magazine writing course, because I am not going to rebuild that whole complicated course AGAIN, for free. At $2,400 a semester, it’s just not worth my time. The truth is, if I feel I just must teach one or two courses a semester, I can go over to the Great Desert University and pick up  a course for $3,000, a far cry from what the junior colleges are paying.

Anyway. Before that I have to go down to the church and help set up for tomorrow evening’s silent auction. Won’t be able to spend as much time as I’d like doing that, because I’ll have to leave here at quarter after noon to get to the campus and find the building and room, and will have to bolt down some lunch before leaving for that. So my coreligionists no doubt will once again regard me as a hopeless slacker and tightwad. Oh well.

Tomorrow my friend KJG and I are spending the day at a big artwalk event. That should be fun. Probably we’ll have to break off early, though, to give me time to get to the evening shindig on time. So…it looks like all day today and tomorrow will be occupied.

vite, vite…

Planting Our Pennies has posted a new balance sheet, very  positive. I like the bar graph strategy they use.

Speaking of planting, 101 Centavos has a gardening report  with some information I didn’t know.

Money Beagle posts part 3 of The Worst Job Ever.

Revanche reflects on strength of character.

Donna Freedman generates an incredible number of comments in her report on the pissing match between her daughter Abby and Financial Samurai.

TB sees the light at Blue Collar Workman.

Evan posts an update on his net worth: modest growth in October, pretty darned good for 2012, awesome over the long haul.

And my grutch about yesterday’s classroom pains in the tuchus, complete with salutary illustrations, went live yesterday.

Drat! Must fly! Later…

It’s time to clean out the garage when…

• You can’t find your (expensive!!!!) masonry bit, but you can find an old package of box nails whose label looks like it’s vintage 1948.

• You find an empty bandaid box sitting on a shelf amongst a litter of loose nails, screws, and bolts.

• A mysterious green squirt bottle is laying on its side behind a bunch of junk. You examine it: Deep Woods Off! You haven’t visited the deep woods since your thirty-something son was in the fifth grade.

• You discover a roll of vine ties hiding among several rolls of duct tape and electrical tape. The vines died about nine years ago.

• You find a Phillips-head screwdriver bit for your drill, sitting at the back of a shelf in its unopened plastic baggie. You still haven’t found the masonry bit.

• You unearth a plastic bag, emblazoned with instructions on how to suffocate yourself or your kids, containing a bunch of gray plastic square things, a baggie full of screws and brackets, and four double-sided stickers. You have no idea what these objects are or what function they could possibly serve.

• You find a rat trap and an unopened box of rat bait that you intended to return to Home Depot, if and when you could ever find the receipt. The neighbor murdered the last of the local roof rats about three years ago.

• You think cleaning the garage sounds a great deal more fruitful than riding herd on clownish students.

Hm. That last one may not be strictly relevant to garage messes. More, one would expect, to the mess that is our educational system. Oh well.

Moving on… Have you ever noticed that the best thing about friends is that you get to pick them? Whereas family…well. Revanche has an always interesting set of relatives who periodically pose some new conundrum.

Mrs. Accountability, realizing her old term policy is about to expire, ruminates about life insurance.

One of the things that’s missing in my personality is the capacity to enjoy spectator sports. Still..Evan writes the first interesting piece about football I’ve ever read. 🙂

Abigail reminds us that it’s a good idea to check carefully before assuming an appliance or other possession is shot and needs to be replace.

FMF posts a second piece on the subject of annuities. It’s worth reading the first post, too, and also the commments on both articles.

Crystal and Len are finally in their new house, after the usual hair-tearing hassles that all us homeowners know and love (to hate). Check out the photos!

TB’s court case over the road rage incident came to a close, and so he is free to tell the whole wild story. IMHO, this TB dude is not a fellow you want to cut off in a dark alley. 😉 Luckily, the whole scary exchange came to naught.

Eemusings got to drive a hybrid on her recent junket. She and her readers contemplate whether it’s worth buying one of the things.

101 Centavos spent time this summer doing battle with garden bugs. Ever hear of catch-cropping? Me, neither. It’s an interesting idea.

At Grumpy Rumblings, Nicole&Maggie contemplate the timeless question facing parents of newborns: cloth or paper?

Mr. PoP describes, in a series of posts, how he went from a minimum-wage job to earning 80 grand a year. Today’s post is the third; scroll down from the homepage to find the others.

Uh oh. Now that Donna’s made the big move to Alaska, it looks like she’s going native!

Brip-Blap writes an interesting and counterintuitive post on the relationship between free time and productivity. Brings to mind the old chestnut that the busiest people are the ones who are most likely to take on extra work and volunteer jobs.

Budget Glamorous is pinching pennies in the time-honored manner of young academics. She’s found a way to earn some extra money, though: international students. Could be promising…

At Afford Anything, Paula has an adoption story that’s more amazing than any I’ve ever heard.

Five-Cent Nickel has a nice post on when to haggle. I hate it, myself…that’s one reason I drive a 12-year-old car: few things are more repellent than the prospect of having to argue with another Toyota salesman!

Speaking of repellent, my head hurts. Think I’ve got another migraine (or a revisitation of the first one). And so, away!

It was 60 degrees on the back porch when Cassie and I stumbled out at five-thirty. Just. Unbelievably. Gorgeous. It’s almost 8:00 now and still cool enough that if I would get off my duff we could go for a walk.

* * *

Incredibly later…

* * *

Yes. A very pretty day. Ambled with the little dog through the beautiful old neighborhood where the rich folks live, nice and quiet and peaceful. Then back to park said dog at the Funny Farm and take off again on a bicycle. Perfect morning for a bicycle ride.

Coveted a house for sale; can’t find it on Zillow or Trulia. Estimated asking price: about $425,000. Oh well.

Back to the Funny Farm: could not stand the dirt one more minute!

Threw a load of laundry in the washer.

Tossed the garbage out of the refrigerator. Hauled all the various hand-crafted and home-made gewgaws out of the desk drawer and two other drawers and moved an old silverware tray into the desk drawer and some little boxes into the other drawers and organized all those necklaces and bracelets and earrings and rings and anklets and tossed the worst of the junk into the craft drawer to be recycled into new home-made gewgaws. Or better, forgotten.

Hung up the clean clothes. Threw another load into the washer.

Picked up the mountains of paper littering the desk. Threw most of it out; filed the rest of it. Wiped the layers of dust off the computer and surrounding surfaces.

Hung up the second load of laundry.

Continued, as above, through four other cluttered rooms.

Cleaned the kitchen counters (stove already cleaned yesterday). Grilled a slab of mahi outside; heated a tinfoil packet of frozen peas with it. Cooked pasta; topped it with fresh tomato, Italian & Thai basil, crumbled feta; whipped butter, fines herbes, and fresh lemon juice together—topped the hot fish with that. Cleaned the outdoor tables. Dined al fresco. Magnificently.

Vacuumed 1860 square feet of extremely hard, foot-flattening tile. Hurt too much to dust-mop and then steam-mop all of said square footage. Mopped the kitchen floor, after scrubbing up stickiest, most grocery-littered spots.

Drew a hot bath. While water was running, dust-mopped house, planning only to hit the worst spots but ended up dust-mopping all the floors. Tomorrow: steam-clean. Now: sink into hot bubble bath. Marvel at the number of places one’s body can hurt at once.

But the house is cleaner than it’s been in months!

Want to know what’s to be done to help America’s kids learn? Read it here. Literacy—true literacy, which means being able to write as well as read, and understanding how language works—is the key to all learning. Too bad educators lost track of that a generation or two ago.

Spare us all from wasted time, no matter what our jobs are. But especially if we’re supposed to be teaching young people.

Holy mackerel! 101 Centavos has been hitting the ball out of the park every day this week. Start with this elaborately thought out discussion of why California’s gasoline costs so much. Then hit the home page and just start scrolling down.

At Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, Crystal & Len have finally made the big move! Yes: they’re into the new house, after the usual round of Contractor Standard Time and closing headaches stacked on top of a trip to the Financial Blogger Conference and running the blogging empire and keeping the business going. Ah, to be young and have that much energy…whew!

At A Gai Shan Life, Doggle is recovering from breathtakingly expensive and challenging surgery and Revanche writes another of those soul-searching posts that are her specialty.

Speaking of cruising a whole series of recent posts (as we were, above), eemusings is back at Musings of an Abstract Aucklander with a whole series of posts describing her travels, complete with adventures and photos. Start here and scroll back through the amazing journey.

What does a strangler fig have to do with personal finance? Mrs. PoP expands on a creative and entertaining trope at Planting our Pennies. She’s got photos, too.

At My Journey to Millions, Evan ponders the hysteria over the new health care tax with some astonishment…for good reason, it appears.

Abigail reflects on her and Tim’s state of NON-poverty at I Pick Up Pennies. Especially considering all those two have had to deal with, they’re doing pretty darned well!

Frugal Scholar and Mr. FS have been in California attending to the difficult job of packing up the worldly goods of his late parents. They came up with an interesting solution to the problem of how to move the stuff all the way across the country, back to Lousiana.

What are hubcaps for? Take a guess. Then go on over to Blue Collar Workman, where TB reveals the real purpose of hubcaps.

Freshly arrived in Alaska, Donna has a decluttering revelation. To wit: Get. Rid. Of. It. All of it! Check it out at Surviving & Thriving.

Well, folks…Mama’s too whipped to read another word, to say nothing of writing any more of ’em. Time to go. Have a good weekend!

 

 

 

Sustainable Personal Finance reports on a surprise harvest from the yard: out of the blue a tomato plant found a welcoming place to grow. Check out the pictures of what the little volunteer produced! And tell SPF about your take on gardening.

Me, I’ve pretty well given up on growing veggies in the yard. Buying them at the store, even organics, seems more cost-effective, and it’s one heckuva lot less work.

LOL! Look what volunteered in my yard. Spotted it when it was just making a bud and thought…what the heck, maybe it will be some sort of purty little flower. Its leaves look vaguely geranium-like, after all.

It’s probably some sort of wild gourd. Could be a squash of some sort, I suppose. But…does that look like a zucchini or a crookneck to you? Naaaahhhhh….  SDXB had a squash-like volunteer in his yard a couple of years ago. Hoping for a bonanza, he let it grow. It turned into a leggy, sprawling vine with hard, inedible fruits, evidently a native gourd that never made it to cultivation.

Budgets are Sexy hosts an amazing story in which blogger “Joe Taxpayer” claims to have turned a $4,550 profit by taking up a credit-card lender on a 10% back offer: he and the wife used this miraculous Platinum Mastercard to buy $50,000 worth of Visa and AMEX gift cards. It worked for him. But…hmmm…. Don’t try this at home, kids! 😉

At I Pick Up Pennies, Abigail ruminates about the crying need (or not…) to own a smartphone. In the ensuing comments, one of her readers mentions an app called Pinger that allows iPad and dumbphone users to make free phone calls and texts. Suddenly this makes my iPad look a lot more interesting…

Over at My Journey to Millions, Evan contemplates the strategy of borrowing from himself (i.e, against various assets) to come up with a larger down payment on the house he’s buying. Uh huh. That’s one of several ways Ex-DH and I got ourselves one million dollars (count’em, $1,000,000) in debt. Argh! If ya can’t pay for it today, don’t buy it!

Mrs. PoP has been having a bit of an anxiety attack over the advent of her mother, who intends to visit for the next eight days. {sigh} I wish my mother could come and visit.

She died before M’hijito was born. She’d be 101 now, if she hadn’t been murdered by the tobacco peddlers. (And yes: selling an addictive product that you know causes cancer, stroke, and cardiac disease is indeed a form of homicide.) I wonder how different our lives would have been if she had lived even to my age, to say nothing of the 94 years other women in the family have reached. My son’s would have been better, of that I’m pretty sure.

Oh well.

At Bargaineering, Jim Wang is not quite so harsh on the tobacco druglords as I am…but check out this discussion of the relative cost of cigarettes for low-income smokers.

Budget Glamorous is calculating some strategies for gardening on a shoestring. Apparently she has a nice green thumb, for she reports being able to revive those underwatered, peakèd plants the warehouse stores stick on a back shelf and peddle for a few pennies. Where she lives, though, they have a foraging deer issue… Where there are deer, can coyotes be far behind? Maybe set out some dog food to call the coyotes in? Deer repellent on four feet!

Eemusings is filling a blog break with a whole series of guest posts at Musings of an Abstract Aucklander, some of which are very good. I got a kick out of cantaloupe’s reflections on what she learned while couch-surfing her way across the U.S. this summer.

At a Gai Shan Life, Revanche contemplates spending, nonspending, and a large looming vet bill.

Hmmm… Just got a notice from Tie the Money Knot that yesterday’s post, “The Relativity of Time,” has been accepted for this week’s Carnival of Personal Finance, slated to go live tomorrow morning. Thanks for that, TTMK! [Update: Gosh…that post made Editor’s Pick! w00t!]

Have you seen this province in Crystal’s blogging empire? The proprietor of Budgeting in the Fun Stuff, she’s built a number of other sites. This one, which discusses copywriting for various purposes, goes into detail about writing for business websites (and other purposes). Of interest to bloggers, here’s a really good disquisition on five common mistakes blog writers make.

At Blue Collar Workman, TB rings his readers’ bells with a rumination on fences. This post elicits a long series of crazy neighbor stories. Very entertaining!

Today FMF has his usual Sunday sermonette at Free Money Finance, in which he reflects that the advice dispensed by prominent personal finance gurus is basically the same common sense that appears in the Bible. He reflects briefly on how modern-day Americans could have lost track of that common sense.o

Afford Anything came home from a camping trip to a plague of headaches. She explains why delegating tasks is the best way to get a life.

Heh heh heh…you probably have to be an academic to appreciate this. At first, I didn’t realize it was a parody, so near to truth does it ring.

In the seriously??? department, did you know there are people—make that “people who don’t live under the Seventh Avenue Overpass”—who argue with a straight face in favor of going unbanked? The Digerati Life hosts a guest blogger who advocates abandoning commercial banks and following a 100% cash-only lifestyle. Generated a whole lotta comments at TGL.

The hour grows late. The dog wishes to dine. The weekend’s almost over. And so, to work…

 

Half an hour before I have to leave for choir, so this will be short. Videlicet: go here, read these!

At Planting Our Pennies, Mr. & Mrs. PoP ponder a major plant question.

Evan at My Journey to Millions reports on a California law concerning liability for interference in an expected inheritance, very interesting, indeed.

Ever take your car to one of those oil-change places only to have them try to upsell you to a bunch of other (unnecessary!) services? Over at Blue Collar Workman, TB explains how to get your car’s oil changed without  getting ripped off.

I suppose you imagine PF bloggers have no sense of humor, eh? Well, check out eemusing’s new “Open Letters” post over at Musings of an Abstract Aucklander. 😀 She promises to make this a series. We can only hope!

And there’s gentle humor in Money Beagle’s post on a new vision of NFL football.

101 Centavos contemplates the possibilities in second-guessing (or even first-guessing) the investment opportunities presented by the gun-owning public’s uncertainty about the future. Interesting pair of posts, of which this is part 2.

Revanche, a particularly evolved type of working stiff, reflects on the sociopsycho-ecology of working space in an entertaining rant at A Gai Shan Life.

The eternally peripatetic Donna Freedman is at FinCon, as is the lively Crystal from Budgeting in the Fun Stuff.

Mrs. Accountability drives her employer’s van home. Protecting her from herself, it kindly locks her out and creates a spectacular new annoyance.

I must fly! Have a grand Saturday!!